The Demographic Dilemma

My weaving-and-spinning friend's horrified reaction to her conservative Christian friend's unchecked fertility got me thinking about demographics. It struck me that her environmentally-inspired insistence on the one-family-one-child approach was self-limiting; as James Taranto says, if you don't have children, odds are your kids won't either.

Mark Steyn made a splash several years ago with his book "America Alone," arguing that the Western Civilization we take for granted will collapse demographically and be replaced by cultures with higher reproduction rates, notably Islam. It seems that Islam, as well, however, is under demographic pressure. This PJ Media article argues that catastrophic drops in birth rates in all cultures are most strongly linked to increased literacy rates. Backward cultures thus face a cruel choice in the race to compete globally: get educated to compete, and you'll simply die out. As the author notes:

In short, the Muslim world half a century from now can expect the short end of the stick from the modern world. It has generated only two great surpluses, namely people and oil. By the middle of the century both of these will have begun to dwindle.

Why should increased literacy undermine the birth rate? Are we really just looking at Gloria Steinem's famous quip, when asked why she didn't marry: "I don't mate in captivity"? Do a dangerously large fraction of educated women inevitably adopt the view that the child-bearing and -rearing deck is stacked against them?

One of my favorite science-fiction novels is "The Mote in God's Eye," in which the central problem of an alien culture is their biological inability to control their fertility. If they don't reproduce regularly, they die. As a result, because they are bottled up in an isolated solar system from which they can't escape, they regularly suffer Malthusian disasters and bomb themselves back to the Stone Age. The novel's assumption was that human beings were lucky in their ability to control their fertility, at least until they could expand off-planet. For most of our evolutionary history, however, we had only a modest ability to pull this trick off. Our experiment with reliable birth control is only a few generations old. What if the technological development that permits birth control turns out to be cultural suicide within a very few generations for everyone that acquires the ability?

If the bulk of educated women will predictably reject child-rearing, but uneducated cultures cannot compete effectively on a global scale, will we have to re-invent the child-rearing process in order to persuade women to keep doing it? Or will cultures have to find a way to let the men get educated enough to compete, while preventing the women from doing so?

I think a lot of it has to do with the simple fact that assuming the burden for children is very hard. An educated population is more careful about this, even where abortion is not lawful. For example, among men (who have no personal recourse to abortion) there is also an increased off-putting of family formation until later in life, and smaller families. Likewise you are seeing it in Islamic families, who probably make use of neither abortion nor (in many cases) birth control.

The incentive structure may be the real problem. We ask a family to absorb almost all of the expenses of child-rearing. Meanwhile, the young -- that is, the ones involved in family formation -- are the poorest segment of society, and yet are taxed at the same rates as older and wealthier families for Social Security, Medicare, and other programs that mostly benefit the elderly (who are, as it happens, the wealthiest segment of society on average).

If you restructure the incentives, you'll see people having more children. We've made it very hard to do -- each child is a huge weight for the working couple to carry. That will only get worse as the Boomers retire here, and similar demographic problems exist everywhere else.

Educated women in America do very well when it comes to getting married and staying married. It apparently remains the case that worldwide education levels have an inverse relationship to birth rates -- and it's not only the education of the women that's the problem, statistically, but the general level of education (and perhaps technological sophistication and wealth) available to the population.

It already is much easier for virtually any American to take on the burden of children than it is for poor, uneducated people anywhere else on the planet, and yet the pattern is clear: our birth rates are lower than those in developing countries. The problem doesn't seem to be in the lack of subsidy or other support by the general population; the problem seems to be that with knowledge and freedom comes the choice against fertility.

Remember we're not talking primarily about women opting out of fertility altogether, but instead about delaying childbearing to a later age and holding themselves to 2 at most, resulting in an average rate just under the replacement rate. That's something that most cultures appear to do as soon as they get the option, because it's best for themselves and their nuclear family even if it means stormclouds on the horizon for the culture as a whole within 75 years or so.

Educated, affluent women tend to have fewer children but invest far more resources in raising them.

This is why we see these idiotic articles about how it costs well over 90 gazillion dollars to raise a child. Anyone with the sense God gave a grapefruit realizes their child will do just fine without Baby Mozart flashcards and music lessons for toddlers... before they have kids, that is :p

When my oldest was born he lived in a closet hung with cars and trucks sheets. We had no pictures, but I tore animal photos out of old National Geographics mags and taped them all around the inside of his crib. At some point I live in fear that he'll contract some odd disease as a direct result of waking up, grabbing the pictures and then putting his chubby fists in his mouth.

And it will all be my fault.

Seriously, though, I think you both make some excellent points. wrt to this:

Or will cultures have to find a way to let the men get educated enough to compete, while preventing the women from doing so?

That's pretty much what Taranto was hinting at. I saw a writer come right out and say it a few days ago but haven't had time to write about it.

Hard to believe we're hearing this stuff in America, but I comfort myself with the thought that morons raging on the Intertubes (like OWS) are highly unlikely to effect political change in the real world.

My husband suggests another escape hatch. He believes that what leads Western families to opt for fewer children (as soon as it's possible for them to make that choice) is an assumption that society will somehow manage to take care of them when they get old. He guesses that the cultures who manage to pull off having access to education and birth control without suffering a demographic collapse will be the ones that ruthlessly eliminate public safety nets.

It's a very new cultural problem for the human race to solve. We've only just now started to notice that it is a problem. For our entire history, there was no special reason to worry about procreation, because the sex drive is overpowering and there was no effective way to separate it from fertility. Now that those two things can be uncoupled, we're having to find out what cultural institution, if any, can substitute for the ancient biological imperative.

Cass, I'm sure you can guess that I have no sympathy for any program to keep anyone, let alone women, uneducated. What worries me is the idea that any culture that does limit education will turn out to have given itself an unexpectedly strong competitive advantage. I wouldn't like to think that that's a winning move, because it gives me an ugly picture of which cultures will be left standing in 100 years.

What, besides the iron need to produce a bunch of home-grown laborers and warriors to work and defend the homestead, will make people start having families large enough to exceed the replacement rate? Is the lesson that it's not safe to have both birth control and a large, prosperous, secure society in which people assume they can rely on police forces and investment accounts to keep them safe and fed when they get old?

What...will make people start having families large enough to exceed the replacement rate?

Why do we have to replace ourselves at our current population levels? Our current large global population also is a problem we've never had to face in our species history until the last few generations.

There is an equilibrium population, heavily influenced by technology and education now at least as much as raw environmental and prey/predator competition concerns, that exists, and we may well be above it significantly. Cultural imperatives is just one evolutionary path to population control.

Yes, the planet did fine, but cultures that don't reproduce will be overrun by those that do -- unless we figure out a way to get every culture on Earth to reduce its birth rate simultaneously.

This is not a moral judgment I'm making. It's just that the behavior that leads to fewer children is not the behavior that leaves behind a culture to occupy the land. The empty space a low-birth-rate culture opens up will be filed by the descendents of those who produce more children.

Also, if our population isn't going to grow, we really, really can't get away with deficit spending to support a social safety net.

Yes, the planet did fine, but cultures that don't reproduce will be overrun by those that do -- unless we figure out a way to get every culture on Earth to reduce its birth rate simultaneously.

You've got one, don't you? Educate people.

We might usefully do some historical work on the effects of sudden population decline. Any student of Medieval history is familiar with the problem of the Black Death, which cut Europe's population by about a third relatively rapidly. We're seeing a much-less-disruptive form of that.

In general, historians regard the Black Death as a net positive for European culture -- to sum up a huge body of work in an entirely inadequate sentence. Nevertheless, it stimulated the rise of social mobility and equality-based forms of thought (since each person was now much more valuable, even uneducated laborers, given the continuing supply of labor versus the much-smaller supply of workers).

What we can't do is expect our current form of government to survive; and I'm not sure what we do with the Boomers. There are some pretty severe ethical issues that we're going to have to navigate there.

However, I do think we ought also to look at the incentive structures for family formation I mentioned above. I'm not necessarily talking about subsidies, but perhaps eliminating the burdens we impose on young families to pay for a Social Security and Medicare system that simply will not be there for them. We all know it is unfair to them, and given the hardship it puts on their ability to form larger families, I'm not sure why we don't talk to it (except that there are fewer of them than relatively rich, relatively numerous, especially-likely-to-vote older people).

*The hun looks up from sulking over his beer after reconciling 2011 liabilities to the Fed and State governments.*

What? Nah, it's too late in the evening to get wound up on that problem.

I will say, being the cynic that I am, I suspect the refusal by our elected reps to control immigration has as much to do with adding to the funding source for the over-pledged and misappropriated social services funds as it does with cheap labor.

Those complicit in the scam are simply trying to delay the inevitable in order to escape the spotlight while retaining their topknots. A perverse form of political musical chairs.

To Tex mentioning her husband's observation on the reduction in the size of the family unit and why he believes that came about in the West. In a word, yup.

The economics of large agrarian families, like those of my parents, gave way to the efficiencies of modern life, the availability and ease of access to education for the masses, to white collar and good paying blue collar manufacturing work, to mobility, and to more than a few pie-in-the-sky Big Government promises.

Hindsight being so acute, the flim-flam scam should have been recognized long, long ago. But even during the Reagan administration, those of us wanting a major design change in the social services were demonized with the throw grandma off the cliff rhetoric. Ah well, water over the dam.

I also recall as a child being inundated with global over population warnings and being advised by authority figures on how my generation, the early to mid-boomers, should either limit their procreations to two per family, or we should not reproduce at all. Training the young produces results eh?

I would snark a For the Children™ qualifier on the procreation advice, but it was made clear that the need was to protect and preserve Momma Gaea.

The obvious: Without global wars, pestilence, famine, water shortages, etc., the global population will continue to increase exponentially unless education overcomes primitive culture. Talk about a race where at least one of the competitors is handicapped.

Surely there's a "Ask not"... speech in here somewhere for the enterprising politico.

"I know of cultures overthrown by conquest and disease, but none by just breeding."

"Just breeding" is a funny way to put it. Plain old breeding is the only thing that stands between a culture and its own death at the end of the lifespan of lives in being, unless the culture is so extraordinary that it converts genetically unrelated families. Will ours assimilate a massive influx of immigrants? Maybe. More likely it will be replaced, or at least radically altered. A culture that does not reproduce itself, one way or another, dies.

"Just breeding," in the sense of breeding more successfully than the next organism, is the mechanism that has led to the existence of every species now present on the planet. Violent extinctions are the exception, not the rule. The rule is gradual out-competition in the field of reproduction. That's what DNA and natural selection are all about.

Human beings add to these universal primitive mechanisms the overlay of mind and culture. But what if mind and culture, instead of enabling humans to survive where they previously could not, suddenly begin to run counter to reproduction? It's new territory for us.

Grim's parallel of the Black Death is interesting. I wonder if the mobility and population pressure of the present day would yield the same results after a massive but localized population collapse.

Plain old breeding is the only thing that stands between a culture and its own death at the end of the lifespan of lives in being, unless the culture is so extraordinary that it converts genetically unrelated families.

Yet that's what our culture has been doing for a couple of centuries--first from Europe, generally, then from Asia, generally, then from all over.

Will ours assimilate a massive influx of immigrants?

That, as Grim alluded to, is what education is all about. We don't need genetic conversion, per se. The nations that have a net influx of immigrants have no aging population problem (or not much of one). The cultures that replace themselves do so with education so that that net influx of immigrants assimilate into the culture of the nation they've just entered, rather than altering that culture to align more with the one they just left (and thereby destroying the very thing they came to enjoy)--and that's how cultures "breed" for survival.

We don't need more babies to preserve our culture--and so our nation--we need better education techniques. Although endogenous baby production has its own large benefits.

"Just breeding" is a funny way to put it. Plain old breeding is the only thing that stands between a culture and its own death at the end of the lifespan of lives in being, unless the culture is so extraordinary that it converts genetically unrelated families. Will ours assimilate a massive influx of immigrants? Maybe. More likely it will be replaced, or at least radically altered. A culture that does not reproduce itself, one way or another, dies.

Nice try on changing the subject.

Again, I notice that no one has got an example of any culture being 'bred out of existence'.

And the USA absorbed many more immigrants per capita in the late 19th century than anything going on now.

Eric B., I think a case could be made that the American Indians were overcome by population pressures more than anything else. It was the sheer number of whites and the scale of white encroachment on their lands, not the U.S. Army, that finally defeated them. This, if it holds, would be hundreds of cases of cultures being overcome by population pressures, by the way. A specific example would be the Cherokee, who over time were marginalized by the rapidly increasing white population in the South, then forced to remove to Indian Territory.

It used to be common to claim breeding was what caused the collapse of the Roman Empire as well, bringing with it the necessity of employing foreign auxiliaries, etc., but that's been some time ago.

Also, comparisons to past immigration to the US are interesting, but not necessarily directly comparable. What we need to know are whether current immigrants really are becoming American, or importing their own culture and turning America into North Mexico, or West Saudi, or what have you.

However, one of the points here is that this is a new problem. The objection that it's never happened before is interesting, but could be likened to arguing in 1941 that atomic bombs won't work because no one in history has ever got one to. Just because it hasn't doesn't mean it can't.

A specific example would be the Cherokee, who over time were marginalized...

Yes, but at the same time, no: you also have to account for the effect of disease on the native Americans in the South. The civilizations that De Soto encountered might have been able to handle an aggressively-breeding (and immigrating) culture; but they were wiped out by the diseases brought by the West. When Oglethorpe landed at what would become Savannah in 1733, he met only scattered tribes with very little by way of either historical memory or culture (having devolved into warring factions like the Yamacraw, the Creek, and the Cherokee).

It's very hard for a nonsophisticated culture to survive contact with a sophisticated one: that is true even when the nonsophisticated culture is the victor in its wars. See the Mongols, especially but not only in China.

I don't know that the reason for the demographic difference matters that much. Let's say the Cherokee had chosen to depopulate so that when European immigrants came in large numbers they were unable to resist. It amounts to the same thing, doesn't it?

With the Mongols, was it Chinese sophistication or numbers? The Mongols became more sophisticated, but I assume never had the numbers of the Chinese they ruled.

"What we need to know are whether current immigrants really are becoming American, or importing their own culture and turning America into North Mexico, or West Saudi, or what have you."

Examples of both can be found without too much work.

Too be clear, my problem is not with immigrants coming to the United States of America to become citizens, only with our wide open, uncontrolled borders.

That's why in my comment above I used the phrase control immigration, of which there are existing laws and a responsibility to not only the U.S. citizen, but to those who follow our laws to legally immigrate to the US.

I'm not going to waste time arguing numbers, per capita or otherwise, as if anyone has a marginally accurate nose count on the number of those in the country without authorization...

Speaking of diseases, I've read that TB, among other previously controlled diseases within the US, is making comeback. Hmmmm.

That's why in my comment above I used the phrase control immigration, of which there are existing laws and a responsibility binding the Government to enforce those laws not only for the U.S. citizen, but to those who follow our laws to legally immigrate to the US.

I should have previewed the comment above before I posted. As is often the case I get the blather, proof, post sequence out of order.

Let's say the Cherokee had chosen to depopulate so that when European immigrants came in large numbers they were unable to resist. It amounts to the same thing, doesn't it?

It does, only if you assume that they would have been unable to resist. The Irish have been under substantial pressure from the English for a thousand years; this has included attempts at resettlement such as the plantationing practiced by the Stuart kings.

The first such wave, at the time of the Normans, became completely assimilated by the Irish culture; the planatationing sort-of worked in terms of establishing an adequate capacity to resist assimilation, but it certainly didn't destroy the ability of the native Irish to resist. They are still resisting in various ways to this day.

Many of those at the forefront of this native-Irish resistance are named Fitz-*... but that is a Norman name form. The sophistication of Irish culture compared to Norman culture required the other to adapt to the one, even as conqueror. (So had, earlier, the French culture, which the Normans adopted after taking Normandy; a generation earlier they had been Vikings legendarily led by Ragnar Hairy-Britches).

I'd say when some experts argue that the number of undocumented in the country is 15-20 million, and other experts argue that the numbers are 2 or more times higher, but neither camp of experts is able to determine the actual numbers all because there are no controls or accurate accountings of who has entered the country. That alone, at least to me indicates a problem.

Really? To me, T99's argument is simply that big populations will absorb small ones. She is positing reproduction rates as the reason for the size disparity, but if she's right about the effect, the reason for the disparity shouldn't matter all that much, unless, as Grim points out, it affects one sides ability to exclude or absorb the other.

Grim, That's interesting. What would resistance look like for us, I wonder?

It depends, Tom, on how many of us remember what our civilization was for. The Irish never forgot; the Chinese understood the order they intended to represent.

Do we still? We are debating whether the first amendment continues to have any relevance to our current legal order. That is to say that we are debating whether our civilization still has any substance at all.

The danger is internal. It is the weakness of the soul, the loss of purpose: the loss even of a sense of purpose.